20 RemoteNEPS: data dissemination in a collaborative workspace

Abstract

The German National Educational Panel Study has been set up to collect longitudinal data for educational research. About 60,000 target persons will be questioned and tested within six starting cohorts. This will generate a very large amount of data. Accordingly, one of the most important challenges is to provide comfortable and user-friendly data access that simultaneously allows a high level of data protection. A better infrastructure for research data has been under construction in Germany since the 1990s. Research Data Centers offer a broad range of ways to access data. The National Educational Panel Study is not only matching these common access ways but also developing a remote access solution, called RemoteNEPS. This Secure Data Access will enable users to work with the data from their own computer via a terminal server solution. The data itself will not leave the National Educational Panel Study secure environment. This setting gives the opportunity to provide detailed data to researchers while guaranteeing a high level of data security. As well as providing data security, the concept of RemoteNEPS can be expanded to higher levels of data utility. A community for educational research can be set up to support good scientific practice. Additionally, RemoteNEPS has the capability to handle the structure of the National Educational Panel Study data even after multiple waves or when matching new data from different sources.